Stars:
***
Rating: R for violence
and disturbing images
Run
Time: 1
hour, 42 minutes
Psychological
thrillers need to thrill in order to fulfill their promise. The Jacket
weighs in on a paltry premise similar to Ashton Kutcher’s The Butterfly Effect but ultimately
pays off in tension and redemption.
Adrien Brody
is Gulf War veteran Jack Starks who intones in ominous voice-over that he has
died multiple times. Having survived a
combat gunshot wound to the head, Jack lands back in the states as a
mild-mannered drifter.
His isn’t your
average knockabout as Jack discovers when he’s found lying next to a murder
victim with smoking gun in hand. Quick as you can say Altered States Jack is
committed to the Alpine Grove Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane.
The doc in
charge is the Josef Mengele of Block H (Kris Kristofferson), a sadistic
mind-bender who believes that heavy medication will adjust Jack’s violent
proclivities. To that end the good doctor shoots Jack up with hallucinogens and
shoves him into a morgue drawer for hours on end (ugh).
Once inside
his metal coffin Jack melodramatically trips to his own drummer; cerebral
journeys that afford him the unforeseen luxury of piecing together a number of
psychic mysteries including his own death.
Quick cut flashes of tempestuous nightmares foretell of a crucial
friendship of fate with down-on-her-luck waitress Jackie Price (Keira Knightley).
Gratuitous
romance and abstract dialogue aside (“life begins with the knowledge of death”),
Jacket stays true to its thriller
roots by maintaining an aura of delusional disorder and catering to Brody’s
cadaverous presence. Time spent in the aforementioned close quarters is
frighteningly claustrophobic and uncomfortably reminiscent of The Vanishing or more recently Kill Bill 2 (gulp).
Jennifer
Jason Leigh as a sympathetic shrink and the delicious Daniel Craig as a schizophrenic
inmate round out an impressive cast. Jacket
floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee.